Art Notes

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Is there anyone else who didn’t enjoy
Polanski’s last movie Carnage?
Everywhere I read I find people very enthusiastic about it. Honestly I still
haven’t seen a less than 4 stars review, which makes me arrive to two
conclusions. One, my aesthetic taste surprisingly doesn’t really correspond to
the majority’s one. Two, there is no point of return for a press completely
sold to the mainstream’s fame and interests.

I’m usually a Polanski’s big fan, his
acting in The Tenant will persist in
my mind forever and Rosemary’s Baby
will always attract and magically repulse me at the same time. Ask me to watch
it again and I won’t ever be able to say no, ready for fear and uneasiness to
constantly populate my dreams though.

But not this time. I overtly say I
didn’t like the movie.
Carnage is a very expressionist word, it gives me the idea of a slaughterhouse, where the animal materiality stands in front of your eyes so powerfully that
makes the thought of anything else unnecessary.

The flesh is the link with probably the only cameo I really liked in this 80 minutes long movie.
Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet, the mothers of two kids involved in a childish
fight, stand in front of a Francis Bacon catalogue and the latter pronounces
the most splendid sentences of the entire movie:
“Francis Bacon. Cruelty and splendour, chaos and balance”.

The carnage I’m talking about is the one Bacon paints in his works. Raw human
flesh that keeps trying (in vain though) to share something meaningful with its
similar creatures (in the privacy of the same closed room by the way).
The same carnage Luis Bunuel puts up in The
Exterminator Angel, where, like in Polanski’s movie, the guests of a formal
dinner party, all in their bourgeois clothes and behaviours, end up unable to
leave the room as in a sort of hypnotic trance.

This is exactly what happens in Carnage: two couples (Jodie
Foster/John C.Reilly and Kate Winslet/Christoph Waltz) meet up in Foster
and Reilly’s Brooklyn apartment to sort their son’s childish behaviours out.
From a grown up and adult point of view, they want to (pretend to) find the
good out of the bad situation and solve the problem. After few drinks Kate
Winslet gets sick and throwing up she dirties the coffee-table with Foster’s
art precious art catalogue on it.

From here the situation degenerates and
unmasks the bourgeois attachment to formalities and standardized behaviours.

Starting with a very good plot, the
movie doesn’t present a crescendo of allure and the brilliantly comic idea of a
kid that breaks one of his peers tooth, involving parent’s preoccupations and
different points of view on the gravity of the event, dies in its potentiality
even before being realized.
The movie is a stage of clichés. This is probably Polanski aim, he wants to
make us laugh with bitterish smiles in front of the upper middle class
universe. The same universe Carnage’s audience is more or less part of.
Fine. If this is the director’s purpose, it’s anyway not well achieved both in
terms of screenplay and aesthetic composition.
The characters are just parodies of them selves, they endlessly repeat what
they are supposed to say, ending up being very predictable and in so doing
boring.
I would save just Christoph Waltz who appears to be a more prismatic and truly
ironic individual, although he plays all movie long with his Blackberry as he’s
an important business man.

The entire set, the apartment, does succeeds in reflecting bourgeois standards
but doesn’t really seem to be vital for the story, coffee table and art
catalogue aside. Characters don’t really interact with it as it would probably
had been necessary, since the movie is all about the idea and its consequences
of being stuck in the same place for a while.
This is not the first time Polanski decides to force its protagonists in one
place. Remember The Knife in the water,
where a thrilling ménage a trios takes place in a boat and the castle in the
nearly-inaccessible island of Cul De Sac.

I guess the weak point of the movie is its missed development. It would have
had all the right ingredients for a 5 and more stars review, but it hasn’t been
successful in evolving its potential structure.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Berlusconi, as everybody knows the Italian Prime Minister at that time, was struggling on many fronts.

Several unauthorised photos that
depicted him and his numerous guests at Villa Certosa in Sardinia were
circulating through the main media’s platforms and the Majesty was obviously trying hard to put in to troubles the poor photographer guilty of this
miserable assault.
Veronica, Berlusconi’s last wife, publicly declared she wanted the divorce,
writing a long letter on probably the most sold Italian daily newspaper.

Even Milan’s football followers let
him down writing polemical banners at San Siro stadium, accusing Berlusconi not
to support the team with the necessary economic facilitations anymore.
In the mean time Rome was the scenario of an extreme weird weather, I mean,
weird for Italy’s standards, where usually nothing like monsoon rains or
particularly extravagant weather conditions take place.
I was living in Rome at that time. I was sharing an old small but really
cute flat with one of by best mate. Just graduated, I was basically spending my
time waiting for a good job (that never came).
The apartment was on the 4th floor.

Anna Barribal's window

Buildings in Rome are not just ancient symbols of a glorious past but also
ruins left without any preoccupation of renovation. This could be a strategic
and principles founded choice in terms of archaeological sites, but when it comes
to people’s everyday life, even the legendary roman laziness should take into consideration the safety's importance.
It was early afternoon. I went back home after uni, where I still used to go to
talk to one of my teachers.

My friend wasn’t in Rome for some
weeks and I was staying in the flat by my self. I decided it was the right time
to tidy it up. I can be very messy, especially if I’m alone and there’s nobody
else’s space that need to be respected.
I washed the floor and opened the bedroom’s window to let it dry faster. It was
nearly summer outside, the sun would come up everyday and warm up the city very
quickly. I love Rome during that time of the year, it’s the perfect period to
live in it. During the day you don’t suffer too much the heat and at night
it’s nice to hang around until late and join people who are exactly in your
same mood for the summer to come.

I would never ever expected a
tropical storm.

Barribal's ink on found photo

Suddenly the sky got darker and
darked and a strong destructive wind started smashing things inside out the
flat. I tried to go promptly to the room in order to close the window but it was too
late. Its four glasses smashed one on the other and most of the pieces fell outside on the building’s entrance where in a couple of seconds a dad and his
daughter will have appeared to go out on the street.
That’s why I have a window issue, let’s call it like this.
Nobody got hurt or injured but my poor mind, which every now and then can help
but going back to that moment when potentially something extremely bad could
have happened.
The other day I stopped at the Fruitmarket Gallery and after few years from
when all happened and miles away from Rome, that afternoon’s thought came into
my mind strongly again in front of Anna Barribal’s work.

This London girl loves the liminal.
Her choices go from windows, doors, shutters to even fireplace or cuts in the
paper. All apertures that signifies a possible state of transition.

Barribal's fireplace

Her artist gesture is very simple, non pretentious even when she works on big
scales. Barribal’s simplicity corresponds to what I think it’s a methodical
decision of shaping materiality. She intervenes on her objects and surfaces
with a delicate touch that, far from being uncertain or not very visible, give
uniqueness to the work. Take for example the wall where she drew little spots
on with a pencil. Their subtle silverness creates a kind of sculptural aura.
I really enjoyed her windows. I guess my previous disturbing experience with
them made me enjoy her work even more. I familiarised with it, I felt it close
to my reality outside the gallery.
When she cuts the paper to shape an innocuous knife, I thinks about Fontana
and his spatial concepts, I thinks about me cutting bottle's plastic boxes.
Barribal’s art can be lyrical and solidly attached to materiality at the same time. It can make
wonder about different worlds and pasts or follow no more than the kinetic
noise of a paper “breathing” air on the fireplace.
The ink she uses for intervening on her found photographs well symbolises the
interaction of different aesthetic levels involved in her art.
A very enjoyable and inspiring exhibition.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

I’m trying to
figure out the reason why I tend to smile and free my self in an instinctive
laugh in front of Louise Bourgeois’s work, while watching Paula Rego’s
paintings I find myself unsettled, with a subtle but uncomfortable feeling of
repulsion.

An answer is hard to define though. There should be a point of distinction that
clarifies my different reactions towards them but, if there is, it’s obviously
a tricky and extremely well hidden one.
I’m approaching both of the artists now, really for the first time. Only lately
I’ve become sincerely curious about their works and decided to spend some time
on them, while before, although I was aware of their significance within the
art world, I have sort of ignored and passed over their practices.

There are some
similar leit motiv that recur in the lives of Bourgeois and Rego, some
situations that could have represented a state
of exception. Their inclination and the remedy chosen brought the two women
to protect them selves with artistic weapons.

I have used
these terms such remedyprotection and weapons even though they sound to me openly Freudian, an approach
which, while could be seen as fundamental in terms of life and pulsional drives
comprehension, is instead marginal for an aesthetic appreciation.
At least in my opinion.

Bourgeois left
France to move to USA, Rego left Portugal to live in UK.
No matter any opulence one can refer to as an economical comfort, leaving the
country of origin for a new and unknown one always affects people’s lives in
peculiar ways.
More over, Bourgeois was apparently traumatised by her father extra-conjugal
liason, Rego lived an important period of her life without being close to her
parents. She grew up with her grandmother and her fairy tales.
It’s true, through their art works the viewer can easily come to one conclusion
which is the meaningful and persistent importance of childhood that constantly
absorbs Bourgeois and Rego approaches towards art.
They both like to play, I believe they use a desecrating language in their
works, probably the same they had and still have in life too, in order to
dignify a black humour too often analysed by psychoanalysis as a replacement
for something else.
I think Bourgeois and Rego love to laugh before anything else. Irony is
fundamental for itself. A black humour is an essential part of style without
the need to justify its use in terms of a trauma’s remedy.
I’m so astonished by the French artist’s comment on her portrait took by
Mapplethorpe with a non-phallus
sculpture under her arm. Just the objectively undeniable wrinkle’s appearance
on her face affirms she is not a playful kid anymore.
But still, I wonder what in a kind of way obsesses me in Rego’s paintings. She
probably filters the ambiguity in a subtler way than Bourgeois. The fact she observes
a sort of more traditional figurative standards make the fiction less fiction
and closer to reality instead.
Bourgeois’s spider or Destruction of the
father installation presents them selves as already artefacts and the
viewer’s affection is relieved recognizing a different and possibly cathartic
level from the real traumatic experience.
Rego’s paintings are very likely not to create this step that distinguishes
between an imaginative and a non-fictional fact. The viewer lives under her
skin what she has in front of her eyes. It’s like adverting for real how it’s
like to be in a room where so unusual actions take form and to feel the
uneasiness derived from the impossibility of avoiding the undesirable.

Girl lifting her skirt to a dog by Paula Rego

Rego’s art talks about the friction between the viewer’s expectations and what
she ends up to see. One doesn’t expect upper middle class women to break the
un-written codes of their society and behave in unpredictable ways such for
example showing a dog what the have underneath their skirts.
Rego probably plays with ambivalence more than Bourgeois does and I personally
found hard to face the negative of the scaring as a life’s part in need of
acceptance.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

During my years
at university there were some exams I will never forget about. Between them the
so called Fenomenology of styles was
the most terrible due to the fearsome professor. He has been literally an
institution for Bologna’s Dams (which stands for Disciplines of Art Music and
Spectacle) and extremely well known for his picky and meticulous precision. I do remember I learnt a lot of
dates and names by heart and I found very helpful trying to keep in mind topics by
associating concepts to images, names to figures.

Fight the nothingness by D. Shrigley

Spot painting by Damien Hirst

That’s what
David Shrigley's Brain Activity
exhibition is about as well.
Firstly when I entered the room and I saw the series of drawings I thought he
was mainly using the function of tautology for which the speaker adopts two
different words (or forms in this case) to express the same meaning, even
repeating it unnecessarily.The word door it does correspond with a painted door, the word mirror
reflects the image of an oval mirror, as well as the word stairs indicates the one we know as a stairs on the paper.
However, for some of these paintings this tautology formula doesn’t work
properly. There is

a gap between the artist’s written indication and the image,
a sort of friction between what the viewer would expect ordinarily and what
Shrigley presents us with his by now well know black humour. Through this
approach, a gravestone becomes a breakfast list within whose elements also an
aspirin surprisingly appears written down. (not unusual for those who know what a hangover feels like!)
I do appreciate this Glasgow based artist’s way of communicating. His
vocabulary and form are simple and it’s exactly this simplicity that stimulates
the viewer’s reflection.
To be honest, Shirgley basically essential expression made myself wonder around, leaving free my stream of consciousness, I explored my Brain Activity too.

Hanging around the Southbank I
started to make connections between the seen and the remembered. It was very
satisfying and liberating, probably an action that helps your brain in finding
a sense for all the things experienced over the years. It could be another random but
not very casual description of what they meant, still mean or not anymore.

Here is more or
less the sort of map that developed in my head.

Let’s start from
Shrigley's exhibition and then we can move on to my afternoon at the Tate modern,
where once again the majesty and the meaningful quantity of art pieces
literally brought me into a “not like the outside world” dimension.

The Hayward
gallery’s big square room exposes an invasion of insects that the artist
assembled in different shapes and occupations. Obviously this black animal orgy
reminds me Delacroix, I do see this composition as the contemporary version of The Death of Sardanapalus. It’s a chaos
where humans can become animals and vice versa, an advice that jokes with our
pretentious Sapiens Sapiens attitude.

Spatial concept waiting by Fontana

Going back to
the first lines written here, there was a reason why I mentioned that exam I
sat years ago. It’s because while studying the “cutting tendency” of the great
Lucio Fontana, I was feeling a theoretical pleasure in recalling my self cutting with a knife the plastic box of water bottles.
So it happened that, once at the Tate, I’ve noticed the psychiatrist Colin
Blakemore’s comment on Fontana's gesture, beautifully described as an “anarchic
act of violence against nothingness”.
And my mind with a quite regular mental operation went back to the before seen
Shrigley Fight against nothingness,
the giant print outside the gallery and visible from a distance.
Sometime the pleasure you gain out of these kind of connections, no matter if
they are very smart or not, is incredible.
Not as a coincidence, many books have been written and will still be in the
future on the concept of analogy.

Madison Avenue 1975 by Epstein

I’m very fond of
it but sometimes I recognize the affection doesn’t show things in the way they
are, but only in the way you want to see them.
I remember a professor of mine used to say analogies actually are quite risky
because only few are good, while most of them are just casual and not
logically investigated similarities.
Is this comment true or an exaggeration? This could be a good point but it’s
not mine now. As I admitted before, I just followed my stream of consciousness
without thinking too much for a while.

Continuing my wandering
around, I went to few rooms dedicated to contemporary photography, I stopped to
observe Mitch Epstein work and his language, inevitably American (born in
Massachusetts and based in New York) but a bit European too (he actually won a
6 months residency in Berlin).

I found fascinating when an artist could be called in Heideggerian terms essential, in other words and
vernacularly when he remains basically the same over the years and approaches
his medium with more or less the same aesthetical choice. This is what is very
evident of Epstein since the first glimpse. His environmental interests
directed him mostly to the landscape subject, where the human impact is
visible and criticized (see his work on hurricane Katrina for example).

Biloxi Missisipi 2005 by Epstein

Epstein sort of casual “what was a house on a tree” made me think by contrast of Tim Walker's dreamy one. If the tree is the same, it’s impossible to say this for the
furniture.

And again my
stream of consciousness played very easily with an undeniable similarity
between a colourful spots shirt photographed by Epstein and the last Damien
Hirst work that presents his worldwide ubiquitous exhibitions. Let’s put it
clearly, it’s far from me the intention of accusing Hirst of copying Epstein.

Inside outside 2002 by Tim Walker

On the one hand it would be

ridiculous to make a pois motif thematter of a copyright’s debate, on the other hand it would mean having a bad taste in art not to
highlight the unique beauty of ordinary people’s street life sparkling out on a fluorescent lifeless series of spots.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

This post deals with my three weeks in bed.
Leaving out the obvious pain, they were three weeks of weakness, routine and
tremendous boredom.

Fortunately I have good friends who came for
visits every now and then. Fortunately the press abounds with fashion magazines!

After a while I realized I didn’t have to worry
about my headache too much, cos what I mainly needed to look at was the
overflowing quantity of photos and pictures. I didn’t need to concentrate my
brain too much or squint my eyes in order to enjoy the colourful and often
glittering page.
In the Italian language we have an expression that more or less sounds like
“not all the bad things come for harming you” (the English translation should
be “every cloud has a silver lining”). I would stoically love to agree with it.

I don’t wanna try to pretend I usually don’t
read this kind of press, which some people could call frivolous. I sometimes
buy magazines like Elle, Marie Claire but not so regularly. These three weeks
made me a great expert though, now I can even recognize each journal from its
graphic character.

I’m glad I spent my time like this, because I
wouldn’t otherwise have met the great art of Tim Walker. I honestly never
bumped into his works before and it was with pleasure that I kind of closed a
circle.

During these days I developed a particular attention to ads. I got most
fascinated by a Chanel’s perfume publicity and, last but not least, the Moet
& Chandon beautiful one with a stunning Scarlet Johansson, smiling on a
stairs and surrounded by heaps and heaps of champagne glasses.

All these brought me back to Tim Walker, their
surrealistic author, who loves to snoops around magical realities.

His enchanted worlds have lots in common with
Alice in Wonderland, where places don’t follow a rational logic of proportion
or pre-established hierarchies.

The London based artist was one of Richard
Avedon assistants for years in New York. But much more British are Walker’s
influences. Cecil Beaton’s style is in fact a superb form of inspiration for
the artist. They both express a meticulous cure on details, which have to be a
bit dandy and a bit unique. Either the daisy in Marilyn’s hand (by Beaton) or Scarlet
Johansson’s red lips are irreplaceable.

The circle is closed, cos again Walker is the
author of the photo-short story “Like a doll”, diamond point of Italian Vogue's January 2012 edition.

A blonde, pale blue eyes lolita, in between
being spoiled and tremendously sad and lonely, spends her days with a giant moving
doll. Probably three times bigger than the girl, the Shirley Temple-like doll
seems to dictate to her dominated friend. The latter cleans up the house, makes
cups of tea, which are constantly broken by the doll’s (willy-nilly)
clumsiness. The crying Lolita also reads her fairy tales before going to sleep.

What surprises the most is the girl’s
inescapable sadness, even when the doll is not around. Their relationship has
to be ambiguous. Take the last two photos for instance, both of them great
examples of a sublime aesthetic composition. In the first one, it’s futile for
Lolita to try to hide her self. If what she looks for is salvation, she won’t
be able to reach it, always followed or preceded by the doll’s eyes and body.
But in the last photo, the girl wants some comfort from her companion, she
picks up the end of the doll’s dress and uses it to dry her tears. Love and
hate, fear and trust.

As to remind how things and situations can be deeply
understood only by a clear opposition.

This ambiguous couple has got something very
cinematographic, I think about Hitchcock for example. There is literature as
well, for which my mind goes to Hoffman and his Sandman. And there's a music masterpiece too, born from Lou Reed's melancholia.

Tim Walker creates a magical circle of empathy, where the viewer can’t help but experiences repulsion and attraction all in
once.

Monday, January 23, 2012

During the last Christmas vacation I watched
“Il vento fa il suo giro”, movie by the Italian director Giorgio Diritti. The
chosen location is the region Piemonte. A beautiful, solitary landscape,
sometimes hard to deal with for the intricate relationship human-nature, but
fruitful and cultivated with affectionate sacrifices by the inhabitants.

And again, it’s Piemonte the region where the
artist (painter and sculptor) Valerio Berruti comes from (I'm obviously not a website's expert, but I do suggest to check his one out. It's extremely well done). He was born in Piemonte and
there he lives in a stunning and breathtaking deconsecrated church, which he
bought and restored.

By now, when I think about Piemonte, I imagine
its immense potentiality for artistic inspirations and it nearly seems to me to
breath the pure and not polluted air of these lands. A wine’s territory where
the people’s low concentration possibly stimulates a fruitful and sometime even
poetic reflection.

Let’s go back to Berruti. This guy is class
1977, already well-known by the critic (he studied art critique himself) with
few experiences abroad too in his portfolio.

His land is not directly represented in his
works though. The main, I’m temped to say absolute, theme is childhood. The
series of portraits of children, alone by themselves, with their families or in
couples, are numerous. Berruti seems to pay tribute to the twins dynasty (Diane
Arbus, Stanley Kubrick, just to quickly cite the biggest references) and to
inherit its perturbing allure too.

I’m very impressed by the “innocent” simplicity
of Berruti’s works (when I write the word innocent
I always have in mind Hegel’s believe that “not even a rock can be innocent”,
imagine a child. Anyway, it’s not my intention to enter the topic). He often
paints in fresco on jute. Few lines and just a bit of colour are enough to
leave a strong impression on viewer’s mind.

The aesthetic delicacy is nearly embarrassing.
Embarrassing because I feel a sort of guilty in adding comments to this
pureness I’d like to have remained in contemplation of.

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the expression on
kids faces, the way they line up their mouths, but the childhood is far away
from being the time for playing and laughing. These children seem to be already
suspicious, thoughtful about what will happen next. Are they already
disenchanted? If so, it would be extremely sad, but acceptably realistic.

Sometimes the artist doesn’t close the line he
is drawing as for describing a radical openness, the one that connects
everybody’s life to the uncertainty of the doubt. Kids don’t want to grow up as
well as people of all ages have difficulties in dealing with their supposed
responsibilities. The childhood is indeed the place of potentialities, where
all can happen, up to each of us choosing our own personal direction. Then
frustrations are likely to come if in retrospect we look back in ager, thinking
about what we should have done differently.

I do like the open line Berruti chooses. I like
the discourse that can be developed from a structure of materiality that each
of us easily share. Everybody has been a child. In so doing, Berruti evokes the
Kantian universal-subjective, which
is the undeniable common ground for any art experience.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Adolfo Wildt (Milan, 1868-1931) is the
forgotten genius of Italian twentieth-century. For a long time, despite
recognitions and fame that he reached in life- for evident merits he was given
of the sculpture chair at the prestigious Accademia di Brera and was also
nominated Accademico d’Italia- critics appreciation was always controversial.
Only now people start to considerate him among the main twentieth-century
sculptors.

Not a member of the avant-garde world and anti-conformist,
capable of melting in his art a classic and anti-classic style together, Wildt is a unique case in his being each
time all and without a place. The past is not a linear flux of passed
things anymore, but, as Baudelaire teaches, a new time, decadence and modernity
together, a vast land of crystallized meanings- Egypt and Greece, Gothic and Renaissance-
that survive one next to the other, available to the use and the risk of
interpretation.

Wildt’s incredible technical excellence and his
extraordinary versatility were criticized both by conservators and supporters
of the modern. They didn’t see him sharing their same line, either due to his
still Symbolistic contents and his formal choices that were characterized by
gothic and Expressionistic echoes, parts neither of the Mediterranean tradition
or the regime art.

They used to question his fidelity to the figure,
the monumental vocation, his on-going dialogue with the main sculptors and
painters of the past, and the sculpture choice as a technique’s glorification.

Not less controversial was his use of marble as
the traditionally favourite material, which he knew how to shape with
surprising effects reaching the image’s highest purification.

Wildt’s fortune has been affected by these
aspects for a long time. Nowadays we are touched by a fascination that only a
great exhibition can finally give back.

Starting from the unique group of works
preserved in Forlì, due to Paulucci di Calboli family’s patronage (a family
that was a protagonist of both the histories of town and nation) and thanks to
Archivio Scheiwiller’s availability (Scheiwiller was the great publisher that
inherited a lot of Wildt works and materials through relatives connections) to
put together Wildt extraordinary masterpieces and to re-construct the most
complete path of his either sculpture and graphic production is now possible.

The idea that rules this exhibition is not just
the one of a solo project, but also
the idea of a path that (like the case of the recent Canova exhibition always
in Forlì) deeply connects Wildt works to the ones of past’s artists (as Fidia,
Cosmè Tura, Antonello da Messina, Dürer, Pisanello, Bramante, Michelangelo,
Bramantino, Bronzino, Bambaia, Cellini, Bernini, Canova) and modernists as well
(Previati, Dudreville, Mazzucotelli, Rodin, Klimt, De Chirico, Morandi,
Casorati, Martini, Messina, Fontana, Melotti). Wildt did compare him self with
them in an intense and original way, passing through different artistic fields
and moments.

His favourite themes, like the myth and the
mask ones, allowed him to hold a dialogue also with music (Wagner) and his
contemporary literature, from D’Annunzio (who was his collector) to Pirandello
and Bontempelli. Wildt has been able to create an Olympus of perturbing modern
idols, for instance he did colossal portraits of Mussolini, Vittorio Emanuele
III, Pio XI, Margherita Sarfatti, Toscanini and much more other heroes of that
time.

Wildt’s will is to take gestures, faces, human
figures to an essential nudity, capturing the soul of it in order to allow the
thought to reach a composed and mature harmony between the line and the form.